“How soon do you expect details?”
“Mail packet's due any day. If it's an uprising, Chipewyan will send to Fort Vermilion for reinforcements and notify Ottawa
through here. If it's your marauders, they'll handle it themselves and report. Three hundred troopers ought to be more than enough to cane a ragtag bunch of American bandits.”
In the interest of putting aside our cultural differences I held my tongue. I looked at the directions again, returned them to the envelope, and put it inside my shirt. “I'll ride out tomorrow and talk to your survivor,” I said. “You didn't tell me her name.”
“Weathersill. Her Christian name is Hope, if you can believe it.”
“I wouldn't want to know a set of parents who would name their daughter Despair.”
“Yes,” he said, and remembered his wine. “Quite. Perhaps I shall have good news for you when you return. You may be back in Helena in time to celebrate George Washington's birthday. Gala event, I suppose: Fireworks and pageants and the mayor parading about in tights and a powdered wig.”
“No, we generally save that for Independence Day, when we beat the tights off King George.” I paid for my meal, excavated my bearskin from under the coats that had accumulated on top of it, and went out, leaving George Washington face up on the table.
A pair of large
charred log timbers formed a rude cross at the top of a mound of freshly turned earth overlooking the roiling Saskatchewan, visible for a mile through gaps in the tall pines. It marked the mass grave where Inspector Vivian and his volunteers had buried the victims of the Christmas massacre, and if it weren't for that feature I might have been a week finding the remains of the settlement; for reasons roughly having to do with the banishment from Eden, God never places gold in the middle of a well-traveled road.
However, the inspector's directions were accurate. Late in the forenoon of the second day out of Moose Jaw I pushed the mustang and pulled the gray up a hill covered with sugary snow and looked down from the top upon the black and broken evidence of atrocity.
Snow had fallen since the event, but not enough to cover the raw wound. Piles of scorched logs lay in regular patterns, spaced evenly apart like the shacks and cabins that had preceded them, with stone chimneys rising obstinately from the rubble. Some of the logs had burned entirely but retained their original
shape even though they were made completely of ash and would crumble apart at the touch, like cigars left to burn themselves out forgotten in an ashtray. On the downhill side of the river opposite the settlement, a sluice built of logs sawn in half for the purpose of washing away silt and sand from recovered ore had collapsed in a broken line, its supports knocked loose with axes or kicks from horseback. After a month the scene still smelled of soot and burned flesh. I could swear I heard the echoes of gunfire, rebel yells, and the screams of the maimed, raped, and slain. Perched on that hill I felt twenty years wash away; I was back at Stone's River, after the battle.
At the near end of the string of debris appeared a white pyramid which I took at first for a snowdrift, but it turned out to be a tent made from a wagon sheet. There was no sign of life nearby. I called out that I was a friend come with supplies, and listened to my own echo bang around among the trees and ridges for the better part of a minute. When no reply came after the second time, I transferred the Winchester from its scabbard to my lap and picked my way down the grade.
The sorrel became skittish and the gray tried to back up when we reached level ground; the stench of death was faint but unmistakable. I used my spurs and jerked the lead, but after another fifty yards the gray set its feet and would not budge. I stepped down, dallied the lead around the saddle horn, and hitched the sorrel to a low spruce, then approached the tent carrying the Winchester. There was no sign of a recent campfire outside the tent, and no smoke-hole in the canvas to accommodate one inside Indian fashion. I was cold enough in my bearskin, and I had been moving. How a person managed to stick in one place in that frozen country without a fire and avoid freezing to death was a mystery. Perhaps she had died, and been dragged away by wolves or a bear. Camping the night before, I
had heard the weird baby-cry of a grizzly not far away, and had built my fire large to keep from waking up with a leg gnawed off. What Bliss and Whitelaw had started, the Canadian woods might have finished.
In front of the tent I stopped and called out again. When no one answered I pulled aside the flap, sidestepping quickly in case lead came out. It didn't. I ducked my head and went inside.
What light there was came filtered through canvas. The sun was dazzling on the snow outside, and I waited a minute for my eyes to catch up to the change. Otherwise I would have been out in thirty seconds. I was alone in the tent with a buffalo-plaid blanket someone had been using for a bed and an iron-bound trunk with the lid thrown back.
Out of curiosity I stepped over and poked through the contents with the barrel of the Winchester. The trunk was full of tangled cloth, patching and dress and curtain material selected with care by a woman determined to make a civilized life for herself and her family in the wilderness. There was calico and denim and tightly woven wool, flannel and duck canvas and one slim roll of damask, expensive to obtain and wrapped in cheap blue cotton to protect it from handling. Everything else looked as if it had been pawed through recently. Some of the material was brown at the edgesâpart of the trunk's lid was scorchedâand there was a strong smell of stale smoke, but the trunk must have been stored somewhere the flames hadn't reached. I used the carbine's muzzle to work the top off a straw sewing basket. It contained spools of gaily colored silk and cotton thread, a sheaf of dress patterns on tissue carefully folded and tied with a pink ribbon, and a handful of shriveled black walnuts stashed by a squirrel.
Two large scraps of gingham and gauzy lace were spread out side by side on the earthen floor. A pair of shears with black
enameled handles and sawtooth blades lay on the gingham, freckled slightly with rust. Bits of brownish fabric lay nearby, curled like dead centipedes. Someone had been busy trimming the smoke-stained edges.
I withdrew the Winchester from the trunk, hoping I hadn't gotten any oil on the fabric. Out there among the wolves and Indians I felt as if I had violated the sanctity of a woman's bedroom. I slunk outâand that's when someone shot me and ruined billiards forever for Page Murdock.
I've had forty years
to sort things out and I still can't swear to how much of what I witnessed next actually happened and how much I dreamed through a haze of pain so thick it could almost be called a form of sleep.
Start with the shot.
The evidence of all that domestic activity involving the scraps of material in the tent had knocked the edge off the caution I normally carried into open territory along with my weapons and provisions. I threw the flap wide and stepped right out into the open with the Winchester dangling at the end of one arm. The sunlight was brilliant after the dimness inside. I saw a purple shadow against the sky and my hands were just receiving the signal to raise the carbine when something struck my right side with the force of a boulder and my feet went out from under me and I went down hard on my tailbone. My lungs collapsed and a lightning-bolt of pure white pain shot up the base of my spine to the top of my skull. I have a clear memory of realizing what had happened to me, of the importance of finding my legs and scrambling for some kind of cover before a second shot
came, and then a red-and-black wash took away my sight and I teetered over backward into a hole I hadn't noticed before and fell into warm darkness. It was like tumbling back into the womb.
The rest is a tangle. I remember a woman with her hair loose and blowing wild; Farmer Donalbain's weathered features ringed by his Quaker beard; an Indian with a platinum watch chain strung across his middle just the way the meat millionaires wore them in Chicago; striped and solid-color ivory balls rolling on green baize; John Swingtree's hairless skin plastered to his skull, his body in chains; the smell of uncured buckskin boiled in some solution made of pure stench; Sloan McInerney telling Judge Blackthorne he'd spent eight hundred dollars on a cigar at the Coliseum; the sound of bone utensils clanking against each other like hollow metal; a clear tenor voice chanting, “Sharp be the blade and sure the blow and short the pang to undergo”; the taste of something warm and liquid with a greasy base and dried greens floating in it. I'm pretty sure now the chant and the ivory balls and Sloan McInerney were left over from before, and I doubt either Swingtree or Donalbain had shaken loose from their respective prisonsâthe territorial house in Deer Lodge and the lonely wheat farm below the Canadian borderâand traveled north, but I'm undecided whether I actually saw the Cree chief Piapot, particularly since he made a strong enough impression to visit me in my dreams as recently as two months ago.
The rawhide and foul stench were real enough. When I awoke for certain and pulled aside my bear coat, which someone had spread over me like a blanket, my shirt was open and the lower half of my trunk was encased in a buckskin wrap from which all the hair had been scraped and which had dried as hard as plaster. I rapped it with my knuckles, testing it, and got a crisp report as if I'd knocked on a door. It was as tight as a corset and
restricted my breathing, but I wasn't in pain. I had seen Indians repair shattered buttstocks and splintered lodge poles with the same device, but this was my first experience with it in healing.
Sunlight filtered through canvas. I was lying on the buffalo-plaid blanket I had seen before, and when I turned my head the trunk full of fabric was still there, but with the lid shut. I spotted, perched on the ground beside the blanket, a white china bowl with a delicate scalloped design around its lip, marred by a black stain and a crack on one side. I smelled cooking grease and boiled greens, and something clawed at my stomach lining. I was famished. I reached over and touched the bowl. It was still warm. I twisted a little to get both hands around it.
That was a mistake.
Pain lanced my left side. I gasped, dropped the bowl, and fell back while a sheet of white fire swept over me. Someone groaned loudly in the cracked, froggy voice of an old woman. It was me.
Something tore aside the tent flap then, allowing a brass beam of pure sunlight inside and in its middle the same purple shadow I had seen just before the door slammed in my face. I saw a glint off gun metal. I put my hands on the ground and tried to slide backward, like a startled snake slithering for cover in the shadow of a rock. The pain rocketed up my side, paralyzing my right arm. It buckled and I fell over sideways, into a fresh country of pain.
I had been shot before, and taken blows, fallen off horses and trains and mountains; broken bones and been bunged up for weeks. The agony I had known those times was something I prayed to get back to from where I was now. On none of those occasions had I been hurt so badly I didn't care if someone put a bullet in my brain. I peered through the throbbing watery fog at a woman with her hair loose and blowing wild, at the great
gaping muzzle of the horse pistol she had pointed at me, and didn't care which end she used on me as long as it put me back in that warm dark womb I'd had the bad sense to crawl out of in the first place.
The pain reached high tide and began to recede. My vision cleared, particle by particle, like bubbles bursting. The woman was a giant, standing over me with her shoulders hunched slightly to keep her head from brushing the top of the tent; but then I remembered I had had to stoop as well the first time I entered it, and that now I was looking up from the ground. She wore a man's canvas coat that hung loosely enough to expose the blanket lining, the cuffs turned back a couple of times, but apart from that she was dressed as a woman, in a plain brown dress whose hem hung to the insteps of her lace-up boots, its edge dirty and tattered from dragging the ground. She had a cartridge belt buckled around her waist with six inches of leather flapping free because she'd had to punch an extra hole to make it fit and an empty holster. The revolver that belonged to the holster, a huge Walker Colt designed for carriage in a scabbard attached to a saddle, was heavy enough to bend her wrist with its weight, but she didn't look as if she wanted to put it down any time soon. Her other hand was occupied with a double-barreled Stevens ten-gauge shotgun, the kind Wells Fargo messengers carried, with the muzzles pointed at the ground. I counted myself fortunate that when the time had come to shoot me she had decided to use the pistol. If it had been the shotgun there wouldn't have been enough left of me to shovel into the tent.
She had a good face, if you liked strong bones and eyes that didn't shift. The skin was sunburned from the light reflecting strong off the snow, peeling like old paint, but with a good scrubbing and some powder and rouge, it would turn the occasional
male head at even so jaded a place as Delmonico's in New York. Just now it was severe and hawklike, the pale gray eyes as hard as January ice and just about as responsive. There was an animal alertness in them but no sign of human intelligence.
“I'm guessing you're Mrs. Weathersill.” My voice scarcely qualified as a croak. “My name's Murdock. I came from Moose Jaw with provisions.”
Hope Weathersillâfor it could have been no otherâsaid nothing, and gave no indication that she'd understood my words. After a long time her eyes moved, flicking toward the spilled bowl next to the blanket, then back to me quickly, as if I might make an attempt of some kind while her gaze was elsewhere. After another long silence she moved, and at the end of so much stillness it was as if the Cascade Range had lifted its skirts and danced the Virginia reel. However, all she did was insert the muzzles of her shotgun inside the bowl, slide it over toward herself, and stoop to pick it up, during which her eyes and the Colt remained on me. When she had the bowl in the same hand in which she held the shotgun, she backed out of the tent. Through the open flap I saw an edge of yellow flame and heard wood crackling.
She returned without the shotgun, but still held the big revolver in one hand with the bowl steaming in the other. The bowl must have been hot to the touch, but as she holstered the Colt and shifted the bowl to that hand I saw that her palms were shiny with callus; the life out there had been hard long before the massacre, and she would have taken her turn chopping wood and driving the mules and horses to pull up stumps. Beyond that her hands, face, and dress were smudged with soot. There was soot in her hair as well, and it was tangled and snarled so badly it would have been easier to cut than comb. Only that delicate bowl and, when she knelt beside me and shipped soup
into a spoon, the ornate filagreed silver of the handle between her thumb and forefinger bore witness to more civilized aspirations, clouded now by green tarnish.
Painfully I propped myself up on one elbow to accept the spoon between my lips. She made no attempt to support my head, although as a wife and mother, she would have been skilled in the details of tending to the injured and ill; as a widow with slain children, she knew that I could not attack her easily as long as I needed one arm to keep from sprawling onto my back.
The soup tasted better than I remembered from my deliriumâless greasy, the greens richer and more full-bodied. Her eyesâclose up, they had a yellow-amber tint, like those of a wild creature encountered unexpectedlyânever left me as she worked the spoon. She might have been nursing a wounded predator, keeping it alive for reasons of her own without trust or tenderness.
“The supplies are on the gray pack horse I brought,” I said between swallows. “I was riding a mustang. I hope you're taking as good care of them as you are of me.”
She filled the spoon again and brought it to my lips. There was no sign that she understood.
When the bowl was empty she rose and backed out of the tent once again. Alone and still supported on my elbow, I inspected the stiff rawhide wrap. It was Indian work, I was sure. What I wasn't so sure of was whether Piapot had had a hand in it or if I had dreamt his presence. If he had, I was at a loss to explain why he should care whether I survived. The Indians I had known respected a man with sand in his belly, if that was what I had shown during our parley, but in time of conflict they were not so beguiled by it they went out of their way to restore life to a man who might bring that sand to bear against them
another day. Maybe the Indians in Canada were different. Certainly the Mounties had a lower casualty record in their dealings with the northern tribes than had the American cavalry on the high plains. Given that, what influence they had with the feral thing that had been Hope Weathersill was a mystery. They reveredâor fearedâhuman madness, but the mad did not generally return the favor. The whole damn country was upside-down.
I probed my left side gently through the wrap. A sharp stab answered, but I forced myself to continue exploring until I was satisfied as to the extent of the damage. I had two or three cracked ribs anyway, but I was pretty sure there wasn't a bullet in there. Either the woman had grazed me with the big Colt or the bearskin had stopped or deflected the bullet so that I took only its impact and wasn't punctured. But the impact of a two-hundred-grain ball of lead traveling at the rate of 410 feet per second is nothing to ignore; a six-hundred-pound log rolling off the back of a lumber wagon couldn't hit harder or make a bigger bruise. The entire side was tender, and since I couldn't inhale deeply enough to fill both lungs because of how tightly I was constricted I wasn't sure that one of them hadn't collapsed.
I felt my head getting light and lay back. Now I saw there was much less room in the tent than when I had first entered it. I recognized some of the bags of flour and the huge salt pork I had brought out from town for Inspector Vivian stacked to one side. It was a heavy load for one woman to carry. The Indians had probably helped, either for a percentage of the goods or because they felt sorry for the madwoman living alone in the wildernessâor just because they were Indians and made a point of bizarre behavior. On that thought I drifted off. I dreamed I was in Helena, dealing myself a hand of patience on the rickety
table next to the Detroit stove in the house I rented in town and getting up from time to time to turn the trout I had frying in my old skillet, covered in corn-flour batter and swimming in hot butter. With the part of me that was still alert I thought that if I could keep that dream going long enough I'd wake up into it from the reality I was living.